Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 102

by Naim Kabir

  Master Deta waves his hand. The giant screen, apparently controlled by body motion, lights up. The image on the screen is difficult to describe: a gigantic, compressed oval whose background is various shades of blue, studded with irregular patches of orange-red dots. Or maybe it’s the other way around. I think the image resembles the false-color version of some planet’s topographic map, or maybe a slide full of multiplying mold seen through a microscope.

  “What is this?”

  “The universe. Or more precisely, the cosmic microwave background. This is the image of the universe about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. You’re looking at the most precise photograph of it so far.” His enthusiastic admiration contrasts sharply with his humble monk’s garb.

  “Um . . . ”

  “This was made by computation based on the data gathered by the European Space Agency’s Planck space observatory. Look here, and here—do you see how the pattern is a bit odd? . . . ”

  Other than patches of orange-red or cobalt mold, I can’t see what’s so special.

  “Are you saying that . . . um . . . the Buddha doesn’t exist?” I ask tentatively.

  “The Buddha teaches that the great trichiliocosm consists of a billion worlds.” He glares at me, as though forcing me to retract my words. “This picture proves that multiple universes once existed. After so many years of effort, humanity finally proved, through technology, the Buddhist cosmology.”

  I should have realized this would happen. The abbot is just like the pyramid schemers in Zhongguancun—anything, no matter how unrelated, could be seen by them as powerful proof for their point of view. I try to imagine how a Christian might interpret this picture.

  “Amitabha.” I put my palms together to show piety.

  “The question is: why has the Buddha chosen now to reveal the truth to all of humanity?” He speaks slowly and forcefully. “I pondered this question for a long time, but then I saw your scheme.”

  “Buddhagram?”

  Master Deta nods. “I can’t say I approve of your methods. However, since you ended up coming here, that proves that my guesses were correct.”

  Cold sweat seeps onto the skin at my back, not unlike that night so long ago that it seems unreal.

  “This world is no longer the same as its original form. Put it another way: its creator, the Buddha, God, Deity—no matter what name you give it, has changed the rules by which the world operates. Do you really believe that the consecration was what allowed Buddhagram to perform miracles?”

  I hold my breath.

  “Suppose the universe is a program. Everything that we can observe is the result of the machine-executable code. But the cosmic microwave background can be understood as the record of some earlier version of the source code. We can invoke this code via computation, which means that we can also use algorithmic processing to change the version of the code that’s currently running.”

  “You’re saying that Mr. Wan’s algorithm really caused all of this?”

  “I dare not jump to conclusions. But if you forced me to guess, that would be it.”

  “I’m pretty science-illiterate, master. Please don’t joke with me.”

  “Amitabha. I am a Technologist-Buddhist. I believe in the words of Arthur C. Clarke: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable at first glance from Buddhist magic.’”

  I know there’s something not quite right here, but I don’t know how to debate him. “But . . . but that project failed. Look at what a sad state Mr. Wan is in. I don’t think I have anything more to do with this.”

  “What is not real? That which form possesses.

  The Tathagata will be seen

  When mind past form progresses.”

  “Master, please allow me to leave the temple and return to the secular world. I miss my wife.” A nameless fear suddenly seizes me like a bottomless pit rising out of the screen on the wall, trying to pull me in.

  Master Deta sighs and smiles wryly, as though he has long since predicted all this.

  “I was hoping that by studying Buddhist doctrine with me, you would be sufficiently calmed to stay here and wait out the catastrophe. But . . . you and I are both caught in the wheel of samsara, so how can we escape our destinies? All right. Take this as a memento of our time together.”

  He hands over a gold-colored Buddha card. On the back is a toll-free number as well as a VIP account number and security code.

  “Teacher, what is this?”

  “Don’t lose it! The resale value of this card is 8888 yuan. If anything happens, you can give me a call.”

  Master Deta turns and waves his hand, and the moldy image on the screen is replaced by regular TV programming. An American quantum physicist has been killed by gunshot. Bizarrely, the shooter claims that it was an accident because he thought the victim was someone else.

  110.

  Half a year passes. I meet Lao Xu at Guanji Chiba, a popular barbecue restaurant in Zhongguancun.

  Lao Xu hasn’t changed much. He’s still pathologically in love with barbecued lamb kidneys. Like a stereotypical Northeasterner, after a few bottles of beer, his face glowing with grease and jittering with emotion, Lao Xu begins to say what’s really on his mind.

  “Chongbo, why don’t you come and join me again? You know I’ll take care of you.”

  Animatedly, Lao Xu tells me what’s been going on with him, spewing flecks of spittle through the smoky haze. After he hid and rested for a while at home, another phone call drew him back into the IT world. This time, he didn’t start a marketing company with no future, but became an “angel investor.” With all the contacts he made among entrepreneurs, now he gets to spend other people’s money—the faster the better.

  He thinks I have potential.

  “What’s going on with Mr. Wan?” I change the subject. My wife has just found out that she’s pregnant. Although my current job is boring, it’s stable. Lao Xu, on the other hand, isn’t.

  “I haven’t heard from him for a while . . . ” Lao Xu’s eyes dimmed, and he took a long drag on his cigarette. “Fortune is so fickle. Back when Buddhagram was on fire, a whole bunch of companies wanted to invest. An American company even wanted to talk about purchasing the whole company. But at the last minute, an American man showed up claiming that Y’s core algorithm was stolen from one of his graduate school research labmates. The American sued, and he just wouldn’t let it go. So the patent rights had to be temporarily frozen. All the investors scattered to the wind, and Lao Wan had to sell everything he owned . . . but in the end, it still wasn’t enough.”

  I drain my cup.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Lao Xu said. “Honestly, if you hadn’t come up with that idea, I bet Lao Wan would have failed even earlier.”

  “But if they hadn’t made Buddhagram, maybe the Americans wouldn’t have found out about the stolen algorithm.”

  “I’ve finally got it figured out. If what happened hadn’t happened, something else would have. That’s what fate means. Later, I heard that the labmate Y stole from was shot and killed in America. So now the patent case is in limbo.”

  Lao Xu’s voice seems to drone on while time stands frozen. My gaze penetrates the slight crack between his cigarette-holding fingers, and the background of noisy, smoky, shouting, drinking patrons of the restaurant fades into the distance. I remember something, something so important that I’ve managed to forget it completely until now.

  I thought everything was over, but it’s only starting.

  After saying goodbye to Lao Xu, I return home and begin to search, turning everything in the house upside down. My wife, her belly protruding, asks me if I’ve had too much to drink.

  “Have you seen a golden card with a picture of the Buddha on there?” I ask her. “There’s a toll-free number on the back.”

  She looks at me pitifully, as though gazing at an abandoned Siberian husky, a breed known for its stupidity and difficulty in being trained. She turns away to continue her pregnancy yoga exercis
es.

  In the end, I find it tucked away inside a fashion magazine in the bathroom. The page I open to happens to be the picture of a Vaseline-covered, nude starlet lounging amongst a pile of electronics. Each screen in the image reflects a part of her glistening body.

  I dial the number and enter the VIP account number and security code. A familiar voice, sounding slightly tired, answers.

  “Master Deta, it’s me! Chenwu!”

  “Who?”

  “Chenwu! Secular name Zhou Chongbo! Remember how you struck my shoulders three times and told me to go to your room at ten-oh-one to view the picture of the cosmic microwave background?”

  “Er . . . you make it sound so odd. Yes, I do remember you. How’ve you been?”

  “You were right! The problem is with the algorithm!” I take a deep breath and quickly recount the story as well as give him my guess. Someone is working really hard to prevent this algorithm from being put into wide application, even to the point of killing people.

  The earpiece of the phone is silent for a long while, and then I hear another long sigh.

  “You still don’t get it. Do you play games?”

  “A long time ago. Do you mean arcade, handheld, or consoles?”

  “Whatever. If your character attacks a big boss, the game’s algorithms usually summons all available forces to its defense, right?”

  “You mean the NPCs?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But I didn’t do anything! All I did was to suggest a stupid fucking marketing plan!”

  “You misunderstand.” Master Deta’s voice becomes low and somber, as though he’s about to lose his patience. “You’re not the player who’s attacking the boss. You’re just an NPC.”

  “Wait a second! You are saying . . . ” Suddenly my thoughts turned jumbled and slow, like a bowl of sticky rice porridge.

  “I know it’s hard to accept, but it’s the truth. Someone, or maybe some group, has done things that threaten the entire program—the stability of our universe. And so the system, following designated routines, has invoked the NPCs to carry out its order to eliminate the threat and maintain the consistency of the universe.”

  “But I did everything on my own! I just wanted to do my job and earn a living. I thought I was helping him.”

  “All NPCs think like that.”

  “So what should I do? Lao Xu wants me to go work for him. How do I know if this is . . . Are you there?”

  Strange noises are coming out of the earpiece, as though a thousand insect legs are scrabbling against the microphone.

  “When you are confused . . . hiss . . . the teacher helps . . . Enlightened . . . hiss . . . help yourself. All you have to do . . . hiss . . . and that’s it . . . hiss . . . Sorry, your VIP account balance is insufficient. Please refill your account and dial again. Sorry, . . . ”

  “Fuck!” I hang up angrily.

  “What’s wrong with you, screaming like that? If you frighten me and cause me to miscarry, are you going to assume the responsibility?” My wife’s voice drifts to me slowly from the bedroom.

  In three seconds, I sort though my thoughts and decide to tell her everything. Of course, I do have to limit it to the parts she can understand.

  “Tell Lao Xu that your wife is worried about earning good karma for the baby. She doesn’t want you to follow him and continue to do unethical work.”

  I’m just about to argue with her when the phone rings again. Lao Xu.

  “Have you made up your mind? USTC’s quantum lab is making rapid progress! Their machine is tackling the NP-completeness problem now. Once they’ve proved that P=NP, do you realize what that means?”

  I look at my wife. She places the edge of her palm against her throat and makes a slicing motion, and then she sticks her tongue out.

  “Hello? You there? Do you know what that means—” I hang up, and Lao Xu’s voice lingers in my ear.

  Every program has bugs. In this universe, I’m pretty sure that my wife is one of them. Possible the most fatal one.

  111.

  I still remember the day when Lailai was born: rose-colored skin, his whole body smelling of milk. He’s the most beautiful baby I’ve ever seen.

  My wife, still weak from labor, asked me to come up with a good name. I agreed. But really, I was thinking: It really makes no difference what he’s named.

  I’m no hero. I’m just an NPC. To tell the truth, I’ve never believed that all this was my fault. I didn’t join Lao Xu; I didn’t come up with some outrageous idea that would have caused the whole project to fail; I didn’t prevent that stupid quantum computer from proving that P=NP—even now I still don’t know what that fucking means.

  If this is the reason that the universe is collapsing, then all I can say is that the Programmer is incompetent. Why regret destroying such a shitty world?

  But I’m holding my baby son, his tiny fist enclosed in my hand, and all I want is for time to stop forever, right now.

  I regret everything I’ve done, or maybe everything I haven’t done.

  In these last few minutes, a scene from long ago appears in my mind: that guy wearing the army coat on the pedestrian overpass.

  He’s staring at me and my wife, and like some stuck answering machine, he says, “The Quadrantid meteor shower will come on January 4. Don’t miss it . . . ”

  No one is going to miss this grand ceremony for going offline.

  I play with my son, trying to make him laugh, or make any sort of expression. Suddenly, I see a reflection in his eyes, rapidly growing in size.

  It’s the light coming from behind me.

  First published in Chinese in Offline Magazine, February 2015.

  Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

  About the Author

  Chen Qiufan was born in 1981, in Shantou, China. (In accordance with Chinese custom, Mr. Chen’s surname is written first. He sometimes uses the English name Stanley Chan.) He is a graduate of Peking University and published his first short story in 1997 in Science Fiction World, China’s largest science fiction magazine. Since 2004, he has published over 30 stories in Science Fiction World, Esquire, Chutzpah and other magazines. His first novel, The Abyss of Vision, came out in 2006. He won Taiwan’s Dragon Fantasy Award in 2006 with “A Record of the Cave of Ning Mountain,” a work written in Classical Chinese. His story, “The Tomb,” was translated into English and Italian and can be found in The Apex Book of World SF II and Alias 6. He now lives in Beijing and works for Google China.

  The Clear Blue Seas of Luna

  Gregory Benford

  You know many things, but what he knows is both less and more than what I tell to us.

  Or especially, what we all tell to all those others—those simple humans, who are like him in their limits.

  I cannot be what you are, you the larger.

  Not that we are not somehow also the same, wedded to our memories of the centuries we have been wedded and grown together.

  For we are like you and him and I, a life form that evolution could not produce on the rich loam of Earth. To birth forth and then burst forth a thing—a great, sprawling metallo-bio-cyber-thing such as we and you—takes grander musics, such as I know.

  Only by shrinking down to the narrow chasms of the single view can you know the intricate slick fineness, the reek and tingle and chime of this silky symphony of self.

  But bigness blunders, thumb-fingered.

  Smallness can enchant. So let us to go an oddment of him, and me, and you:

  He saw:

  A long thin hard room, fluorescent white, without shadows.

  Metal on ceramo-glass on fake wood on woven nylon rug.

  A granite desk. A man whose name he could not recall.

  A neat uniform, so familiar he looked beyond it by reflex.

  He felt: light gravity (Mars? the moon?); rough cloth at a cuff of his work shirt; a chill dry air-conditioned breeze along his neck. A red flash of anger.

  Benjan smiled slig
htly. He had just seen what he must do.

  “Gray was free when we began work, centuries ago,” Benjan said, his black eyes fixed steadily on the man across the desk. Katonji, that was the man’s name. His commander, once, a very long time ago.

  “It had been planned that way, yes,” his superior said haltingly, begrudging the words.

  “That was the only reason I took the assignment,” Benjan said.

  “I know. Unfortunately—”

  “I have spent many decades on it.”

  “Fleet Control certainly appreciates—”

  “World-scaping isn’t just a job, damn it! It’s an art, a discipline, a craft that saps a man’s energies.”

  “And you have done quite well. Personally, I—”

  “When you asked me to do this I wanted to know what Fleet Control planned for Gray.”

  “You can recall an ancient conversation?”

  A verbal maneuver, no more. Katonji was an amplified human and already well over two centuries old, but the Earthside social convention was to pretend that the past faded away, leaving a young psyche. “A ‘grand experiment in human society,’ I remember your words.”

  “True, that was the original plan—”

  “But now you tell me a single faction needs it? The whole moon?”

  “The Council has reconsidered.”

  “Reconsidered, hell.” Benjan’s bronze face crinkled with disdain. “Somebody pressured them and they gave in. Who was it?”

  “I would not put it that way,” Katonji said coldly.

  “I know you wouldn’t. Far easier to hide behind words.” He smiled wryly and compressed his thin lips. The view-screen near him looked out on a cold silver landscape and he studied it, smouldering inside. An artificial viewscape from Gray itself. Earth, a crescent concerto in blue and white, hung in a creamy sky over the insect working of robotractors and men. Gray’s air was unusually clear today, the normal haze swept away by a front blowing in from the equator near Mare Chrisum.

  The milling minions were hollowing out another cavern for Fleet Control to fill with cubicles and screens and memos. Great Gray above, mere gray below. Earth swam above high fleecy cirrus and for a moment Benjan dreamed of the day when birds, easily adapted to the light gravity and high atmospheric density, would flap lazily across such views.